Thinking back over my life, some of the sweetest moments I have had with my family are when hair was involved.
I’m the oldest girl in a family of eight children. It was my job to fix my sisters hair, starting when I was really young. I have three younger sisters, and we always had hair to brush, braid, curl, and style. I was pretty good at cutting hair and cut my younger brothers hair, and gave a few perms to friends. I learned how to french braid when I was twelve and had a steady stream of friends wanting me to braid and/or teach them how to braid.
When I met Paul he wanted to buy me an engagement present and I told him I would love a professional pair of haircutting scissors. So he shelled out the $150.00 for those and I still have them today. I have used them to cut the childrens hair over the years, and when Paul is feeling brave, he lets me cut his hair. I don’t do a very good job, but when we are broke, it saves a few bucks.
Allison went to her winter ball at school last week, and once again I found myself curling, styling, and coiling her hair. Paul came in and snapped a picture.

As the children get older, I find myself grasping for moments with them. They are so busy, especially Allie. She played five basketball games this week. Was slightly injured in two of them. Funny thing, but the church team, which is supposed to be just for fun, is where she gets slammed the most because the other coaches always double team her. She has some lovely purple bruises on her legs right now. The one on her knee looks downright frightful.
Fixing hair gives us a chance to catch up and talk about nothing and everything. This time I found myself going really slow, carefully curling each piece of hair, and reveling in a few uninterupted moments with her.
I’m grateful for these moments of doing the everyday things that allows us a chance to connect and talk. I’m really going to miss my daughters when they leave home and I’m the only women with all these men. The boys are great but it is so nice to have the girls in my life.
Allison was so funny as a child. For years it felt like all I did was chase her with a hairbrush. Some days I caught her and other days I just gave up in frustration and let her run wild with snarls and tangles all through her brown locks of hair. I remember once going in to curl her hair with a curling iron before church, while she was still asleep, cause I knew she would never hold still long enough for me to do it when she woke up.
During those years, I would tell her that the day would come when she would spend hours fixing her hair. She always regarded me with scorn, tossed her long brown hair in a dismissive fasion, and would run to play.

Michelles baptism in 1996, Allison was four, almost five.
Now that the time has arrived when she does spend quality time in front of the mirror, I long for my wild eyed six year old, her hair a mass of knots, dirty from playing in the mud, throwing her arms around my neck and giving me a big smack on the check with a sticky kiss. Some days I cried in frustration because of the many messes she made in our home. They generally involved something dark in color and permanent in stain (molasses spread on the carpet).
And I’ll never forget the day I looked out my kitchen window and saw a gang of kids on the lawn behind our house, and Allison was kicking a boy two times her size in the shins. He did not respond to her taunts and when I asked her why she kicked him, she just yelled, “he made me mad!!!”
Life for mommas is truly wonderful and horrifying at the same time. The aches are real, but the joy, the joy is what life is all about.

Allison ready for the ball.
Jenny Hatch

Majority do not want this ban

“Do parents have the right to spank their children? It is a controversial issue, and while a Bay Area lawmaker wants it addressed in Sacramento — a majority of those surveyed for a new CBS 5 poll expressed opposition to a spanking ban.

In California, it’s currently against the law for anyone but parents to spank a child. A proposed new law would make it illegal for them, too, if the child is 3 years old or younger.

Assemblywoman Sally Lieber (D-Mountain View) wants the practice of swatting a child on the behind outlawed and is in the process of drafting a bill to do so.”

I wonder what Assemblywoman Sally thinks about Abortion.
To my way of thinking this ban is further evidence of the current insanity in our society. Parents in California can murder their own babies in the womb right up until the moment that child is born.
But if discipline is administered….whoa baby, you are NOT allowed to touch that child, you are a child abuser, you must be investigated…..you are a BAD PARENT!!!
Now, Paul and I as attachment parenting enthusiasts, do not believe in spanking as a form of punishment.
However each of our children at one point or another seemed to require a spank to get a certain message at a certain time in their lives.
For example, the first time I spanked Ben (and I have only spanked him twice), he was going through a terrible biting phase where he would bite his brothers any chance he got.
One week he was on a biting rampage, and he was not getting the message that it was a bad thing to do. He bit Jeff so hard one day that he bled, and I had finally had enough, and walloped his little butt really hard. He just looked at me like “what are you doing Mom?”, then he burst into tears. It ripped my heart out, but you know what???
He stopped biting.

He was about 2 and 1/2 at the time, and if that California ban had been in place here in Colorado, in the eyes of the law, I would have been a BAD parent and deserving of punishment under the law.
We don’t need a bunch of lefty abortion advocates telling those of us who have chosen to give birth to and nurture our children HOW to raise our families.
And it has been my limited experience that it is in fact those women who have aborted away their own babies who are constantly on the lookout for evidence of child abuse in other families.
Jenny Hatch

Last night I went to a friends house to bring her a meal and give her a post partum massage. Her baby is one week old, a beautiful little girl, and mom is doing well. As I applied the essential oils to her back and used hot water bottles to warm up her muscles to make the massage more effective, I thought how this was such a better use of my time and energy than just sitting at home watching 24.
We watched the opening of season six on sunday night, and that night I read on Drudge that a potential nuke might be deployed on monday nights show.
As I worked on my friend, whose back was a mass of knots after a long and hard labor, I spent some time thinking about our future life as wives and mothers. She is the mother of three young daughters. My oldest daughter is preparing to graduate from high school, with adult life just around the corner. More and more babies are soon going to be coming into our lives, as the children of friends and my own grandchildren are born. Family survival and healthy living are often on my mind.
I have written quite a bit about family survival here on my Blog and at other sites.
Go Here
And Here
And among the first videos I posted on You Tube were those that dealt with family survival.

I do not have a fatalistic fear of end times events. Rather I have taken a pragmatic approach to preparing for everything that can possibly be prepared for, and then just live my life believing things will pretty much stay the same as they are now in terms of modernity and the comfortable living that we in America enjoy.
When thinking about the potential problems that could crop up for us as individuals, bigotry does have an effect on our lives.
It was thrilling to read this piece today by Hugh Hewitt
It was a powerful piece of writing defending mormons and especially mormon theology.
Here was the best quote in my opinion:

“But now that Romney appears the most conservative Republican in serious contention for the White House, it is open season on Mormons.

In mid-November I addressed a session of the Evangelical Theological Society, an organization of more than 4,000 evangelical scholars. I used the time to warn the theologians that the secular press would soon be approaching them to harvest anti-Mormon quotes for use in profiles of Mitt Romney, and to recognize that to the extent they cooperated in the project to chase Mormons from the public square, and to legitimize the sort of private religious test the public counterpart to which is specifically forbidden by the Constitution, they would be building their own pyre.”

I can easily say that I have experienced mormon bigotry first hand. New friendships cooled and even stopped as soon as the other party realized I was LDS. Harassing phone calls made to my home after I made a plea to the local school board requesting they slow down the “value” endoctrinating going on in our local Boulder Classrooms regarding sexual orientation. I simply stood and shared my heart felt beliefs in regards to sexual morality in front of our school board, and some members of our community, when they read about it in the local paper, felt the need to call and harass.
But worrying about future events, terrorism, bigotry, heck even being beaten up for my beliefs and religious practices, none of these things concern me the way that what is happening in our hospitals to new mothers overwhelms and frightens me.
My friend did not talk about her birth. She simply said over and over, “it was so painful”.
The fact that the C-section rate in America recently topped out at 30%, (rising 4 % in one year) didn’t merit much of a mention in the press. A few naturally oriented chat rooms had some threads talking about it. But mostly it was ho hum, no big deal.
As I worked on my friend and shared with her some tips about how to more quickly heal from her birth, I had to wonder about the care she received from the local hospital. During hospital birth the whole focus is on the birth event, which can cost upwards of thousands and tens of thousands of dollars depending on wether the baby ends up in the NICU or not. We generally spend very little as a society on post partum care, and yet so much can be healed during the post partum if the mother has the six week principle in her mind.
The six weeks following birth are a sacred window of healing:
Quotes from the healing the black hole in health care article:

“Cultures in which mothers and families statistically do not have these problems all do similar things after childbirth. Most commonly, they recognize a 42–day reclusive healing time as key for recovery.

Ayurvedic and Midwives and childbirth educators, who give strong recommendations to their clients to take it easy during the first few weeks, and to arrange for help, know what they are talking about. Chinese, Indian (Ayurvedic), Vietnamese, Sikh, Colombian, and Native American cultures, to name a few, have traditions which (when followed – the last two generations show great loss here, too) take very seriously the care of their women after childbirth.

6,000-year-old Ayurvedic medical texts explain that because a woman’s psycho-physiology is in complete transition for six weeks during the postnatal period, a rare opportunity exists to reset all systems for ideal health. Chinese health professionals agree that the quickest way to help a postpartum mother become a better mother is by taking care of her physiology, and letting her do what comes naturally emotionally, which is to take good care of her baby.

Changing all systems over to normal functioning, recovering from the work of childbirth, being up at all hours, and lactating – which is nutritionally alone like running 10 miles a day – all put heavy demands on a mother’s body and emotions which are already fragile at this time with the tremendous invisible work of recovery from birthing.

Postpartum “Doula” care, which can include cooking, lactation support, house cleaning, shopping, childcare, and massage for baby is offered by many doulas around the country. AyurDoula care is an advanced doula profession trained in the wisdom of the long proven tradition of Ayurvedic medicine. United States AyurDoulas are available in Colorado, California, Iowa, New Mexico, Vermont, North Carolina, Florida, and occasionally include traveling live-in service.

AyurDoula care includes education about and cooking for the rare digestive needs of newly delivered mothers which make a tremendous difference for avoiding both infant colic and maternal depression. These factors are largely unknown by both allopathic and complementary medical models.”

My friend did tell me that her doctor had encouraged her to “take it easy” for six weeks, and I hope she takes this advice. I wonder how things would change in our society if instead of putting all of our resources as a nation into sickness care, by making birth a pathology that a woman needs to be “delivered from”, if we put more of those resources into post partum mother care, and helped the women to heal in the most holistic and natural way possible.
The post partum black hole has the biggest effect on marriages. From the same article:

“A professional report at a Denver International Childbirth Educators conference reported sadly that 40% of divorcing men felt the beginning of the break-up of their marriage was during the first weeks after their baby was born.”

Many men, overwhelmed by what has happened to their wives, who feel economically and emotionally unprepared to deal with the problems that crop up during the first weeks after the baby arrives, simply leave, feeling completely helpless to know how to help their wives recover from what has just happened to them during the birth.
I see the wreckage all around me in my day to day life.
Michelle and I watched last nights taped episode of 24 this afternoon when she arrived home from school, and as I watched that nuke explode on the screen, and observed the helplessness of the people on the show, I felt a sense of sadness wash over me, knowing that this is a distinct possibility for America in the near future.
But as I consider the “nukes” going off in marriages around the births of babies, I have to wonder where true terror exists in our society. When women are cut, drugged, brutalized, and then sent home to “recover” from a completely disabling experience, while having to care for a helpless little person 24 hours day after experiencing such trauma, the effect is going to be family fragmentation.
Sure I’m concerned about terror, and I believe it is prudent to prepare as much as possible for any contingency.
But I am a thousand times more concerned about the new mothers in our society. I’m concerned about what they are feeling, what they are experiencing, and am wondering when we as a society are going to turn things around to make birth more holistic, more natural, and what it is going to take for us to embrace the important work of healing families by healing birth.
I was praying about this topic years ago, and I had a prompting about the future come into my mind. I know we are heading towards Socialistic Medicine as a society. And I had the thought come to me that Heavenly Father would withdraw his spirit from the hospitals when we became completely socialized in America.
I know birthing miracles happen “in spite” of the traumas and toxicity of hospital birth. I have experienced those miracles in the past during my three hospital births.
But how would it be if the Holy Spirit decided that he could no longer abide in that environment, and then suddenly withdrew, leaving the mothers and babies in the diabolical hands of “Current Medical Dogma and Practice”.
A Terrorized feeling washes over me when I consider that harsh reality. My only prayer when considering the future is that those I love will choose to run to Zion, to experience the wilderness safety that is available to all who seek it as they give birth.
I was talking to my best friend Susan during the Christmas Holiday and as we shared our lives and stories, I told her that I was emotionally preparing myself for my children and grandchildren to reject my beliefs about birth.
I explained to her that I would be thrilled if my daughters and daughters-in-law came to these conclusions about holistic living before they welcomed their babes into their homes, but that I was not going to shove my hard won beliefs on those of my posterity who may be skeptical and even suspicious of the way Paul and I have chosen to live our family life.
She agreed that it was going to be very difficult for her if her children chose to bottle feed, vaccinate, or bought into the whole chemical model of parenting. I reminded her that during my first pregnancy, I only considered giving birth at home once I was in true labor. And that it was not even an option I was willing to consider during my whole pregnancy.
I told her that I believed my children would be attracted to people who had been raised similarly, but that I was not the one who would be picking out my childrens spouses. I expressed my deeply held belief that we must allow our children their agency and personal growth with parenting. She agreed, and we both promised to pray for each others children as they enter this phase of adult life in courting, marrying, and then welcoming the grandchildren!
Just thinking about my own husband and how he has evolved into an alternative healing guru these past 18 years after being so medically minded gives hope for just about any person to make the change of heart and belief so needed to live the holistic life.
Paul just came in from the chiropractor as I was typing. He went to California last week on a business trip and was completely chemically saturated after a week living at the residence inn. Our chiro had given him some nutrients to help shove the chemicals out of his system, which were making his kidneys toxic, and Paul had a healthy glow about him from the adjustment and good advice.
I love my husband. I love him for his honest heart. I love him for supporting me while I have been doing the work of welcoming our children into our home. I appreciate him for honoring his priesthood. I love him for delivering our last two sons in the sanctity of our home, and I love him for his integrity and faithfullness in living the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And as the angel said of Mary, I call myself most blessed among women.
Jenny Hatch

Jenny practicing Yoga during Bens pregnancy summer of 2002

Indiscriminate Breeders!?!
Joan Blades:
Yet another voice screaming for nationalized health care and european style nanny state bearocrats dolling out the dollars for lifestyle choices.
Joan,
the answer for families is for young couples to marry and then as the Bible says….Cleave to one another. It says this five times in the scriptures…
For example:
St. Mark Ch 10 Vs 7-8
Sometimes that might mean white knuckle cleaving, where the only thing holding us together is our marriage vows. At other times our marriages might be more strong, sturdy, and established and that also carries us through difficult times.
Socialized Medicine will just give us more bad medicine, without the checks and balances of a capitalistic system which makes medicine somewhat accountable to the consumer. If that system is socialized, consumerism will be lost in the great big shuffle towards collectivization, and then we become Canadian Health Care, where we wait months for necessary surgery, and childbirth is just one big assembly line of drugs, surgery, and more drugs.
I believe morality and freedom are the answer to what plagues the American Mother.
Jenny Hatch